Serena Anderson
Member
HomeTechnologyReview just put up an Ri91 review and the pitch is the same one that keeps circling back: a good looking floorstander with the amplification already inside, so you skip the separate box entirely. Plug in the TV, stream from a phone, done. The reviewer liked the AMT tweeters a lot, described them as open and detailed without the harshness that makes some speakers tiring, and said the bass is controlled and balanced rather than chasing output. He also admitted to running them as desktop speakers for a while, which is ridiculous and which I completely understand.
I keep circling this category and keep backing off, and it is not about sound quality. It is about what happens in year four. A passive tower is a dumb object with a lifespan measured in decades. A powered tower has a DAC, a Bluetooth stack, an amp module and firmware in the cabinet, and when any one of those dies or goes unsupported, the speaker goes with it. I have a pair of passive towers older than my mortgage that only ever needed new binding posts.
The other thing nobody mentions in these reviews is the upgrade path. If you buy powered towers as your stereo, you have quietly decided you are never building a 5.1 around them, because there is no clean way to fold them into a processor's bass management and channel layout. That is a fine decision to make on purpose. It is a bad one to make by accident because the setup was easy.
So who are these actually for? Somebody in a flat who wants proper stereo from a TV without a rack, I think, and that is a real person. Anyone here living with powered towers past the two year mark and still happy?
I keep circling this category and keep backing off, and it is not about sound quality. It is about what happens in year four. A passive tower is a dumb object with a lifespan measured in decades. A powered tower has a DAC, a Bluetooth stack, an amp module and firmware in the cabinet, and when any one of those dies or goes unsupported, the speaker goes with it. I have a pair of passive towers older than my mortgage that only ever needed new binding posts.
The other thing nobody mentions in these reviews is the upgrade path. If you buy powered towers as your stereo, you have quietly decided you are never building a 5.1 around them, because there is no clean way to fold them into a processor's bass management and channel layout. That is a fine decision to make on purpose. It is a bad one to make by accident because the setup was easy.
So who are these actually for? Somebody in a flat who wants proper stereo from a TV without a rack, I think, and that is a real person. Anyone here living with powered towers past the two year mark and still happy?
